All bodies, without exception, end. When they end they sort of dissolve back into the individual creatures that made them up.

There is a quiet kind of impermanence in monism that softens the fear of ego death: nothing is truly lost, only returned. A body was never a single solid thing but a temporary truce among trillions of smaller lives, a colony agreeing to cohere for a while. When the agreement ends, the cells and microbes and minerals do not vanish; they disperse and are taken up again by the larger organism that is everything. We are less like permanent objects and more like a shape the universe holds briefly before letting go. What if dissolving back is not the opposite of living, but the rest of it?